Barbara Kay: One picture lies better than a thousand words

In a hilarious send-up of the Daily Show now making the rounds on the Internet, an Israeli “news team” interviews TV “producer” Drek O’Hara (Drek means s*** in Yiddish), who explains why staging phony news is so much more satisfying than actually reporting the truth.

The satire was prompted by a recent real news story in which a violent scenario staged by Palestinian activists in collusion with leftwing European journalists was mounted to indict an Israeli preserver of biblical archaeology as a would-be child killer. Unbeknownst to the plotters, the plot was exposed as bogus by more objective cameras.

In the satire the news team is representing the Israeli media organ that exposed their interviewee’s set-up. They begin by earnestly apologizing to O’Hara for airing footage revealing O’Hara’s latest “story” to have been completely bogus. O’Hara genially dismisses their concern, explaining that even though everyone knows the Palestinians regularly stage their alleged scenes of victimhood, “Everyone accepts it just the same.” “Why not show the truth?” naively inquires the interviewer. “Because it’s not in the script,” O’Hara smiles. The script has to portray the Palestinians as the “good guys” and the Israelis as the “bad guys,” Why? Because “It works”; any other script is “confusing.”

Sept 30 marked the tenth anniversary of the Muhammad Al Dura affair. Muhammad Al Dura was a young boy allegedly killed by Israeli gunfire in a skirmish at the Netzarim junction near Gaza City days after an intifada broke out following Ariel Sharon’s provocative visit to Jerusalem’s Temple Mount. Video footage of the boy, huddling beside his father behind an oil drum while gunfire raged, went viral around the world, and his name and image soared into instant legend as the new poster boy for Israeli bloodthirstiness.

The image appeared on postage stamps throughout the Muslim world. Bin Laden invoked the name “Muhammad,” softly repeated again and again, in his pre-9/11 recruitment videos. The Ministry of Health in Gaza was renamed for Muhammad Al Dura. In the video of Daniel Pearl being beheaded, the image of Al Dura shimmers in the background. Muhammad Al Dura’s image is today a fixture in almost every Arab home and heart.

But the entire incident was a set-up, 100% staged. The father’s alleged bullet wounds were actually old knife scars. The boy visibly moves in the footage after he was “dead.” There was no blood on the “victims” from their “multiple” gunshots or on the street or wall. No bullets were recovered from the scene. This is but a partial list of the damning rebuttals to the official account.

The cameraman who shot the only footage, freelance Palestinian Talal Abu Rahma, later admitted he had gone into journalism to promote the Palestinian cause. Charles Enderlin, the left-wing Israeli-French Jew who produced it, was well known for his anti-Israel bias.

The Al Dura affair is important because it is the 2000 version of the ancient medieval blood libel against Jews – that Jews harbour a sinister, insatiable lust for the particular blood of non-Jewish children – and because it has inspired other conspiracy-theory “news” items of Israeli bloodthirstiness, notably the staged Rachel Corrie incident and the IDF organ-harvesting myth, that are accepted as truth in the Muslim world (and beyond), just as the odious and demonstrably bogus Protocols of the elders of Zion and other conspiracy theories continue to circulate as fact amongst Jew-haters.

Such myths can only be countered by truth-tellers, but the principal truth-teller in the case of the Muhammad Al Dura story, Philippe Karsenty, has found that where libels against Jews are concerned, truth-telling is an uphill slog. Karsenty, a deputy mayor of Neuilly-sur-Seine and financial consultant, who runs a media watchdog, has made it his mission, and virtually fulltime job for the last decade, to expose the machinations of Enderlin and France 2. His pursuit resulted in a defamation suit against him that he lost, which was overturned on appeal in 2008. None of the facts he has submitted in support of his allegations against Enderlin have ever been successfully contested.

Philippe Karsenty has created a PowerPoint presentation that methodically demolishes Enderlin and Abu Rahma’s fable. Nevertheless Charles Enderlin has had the hutzpa to publish a book, just released October 11, A Child is Dead, in which he stands by his ridiculous story.

Notable in this tawdry spectacle of journalistic treachery is the circling of the wagons by people supposedly dedicated to objective truth-telling themselves. Jacques Chirac likened Karsenty to a “holocaust denier.” France awarded Enderlin the Legion of Honour. Karesenty’s name is mud on innumerable French talk shows. Many French journalists signed a Nouvel Observateur petition denouncing him.

In a recent Montreal appearance, Karsenty said, “I am completely alone in France.” He explains this: “The media do not want to convey the message their colleague lies.”

Media accounts of his triumph are grudging: After his trial, Le Figaro headlined their account of his success: “Karsenty denies he is a strong rightist.” Journalism schools won’t invite him to speak.

At the end of the Israeli satire I opened this piece with, Drek O’Hara asks his interviewers to make sure they note his motto. Which is? “One picture lies better than a thousand words.” When it comes to Israel, ain’t it the truth? Philippe Karsenty is visiting Toronto in mid-November. I hope Canadian media will offer him the respect and support he deserves.